party designations from 150 years ago are completely irrelevant today. Although honestly, if anything you could say the parties have flipped. Lincoln, after all, pushed for a strong federal government (hence the name "Republican") that could overrule the parochial interests of the states' rights people, who back then were mostly Democrats. It's hard to believe that today's Tea Partiers - people who want limited government, local control, and lack of federal power - would have supported Lincoln in 1860.

@ostap666: Who wants to reinstate slavery? Ignore it in the Muslim world, sure, but reinstate it? Sheesh.

That being said, nowhere in the constitution does it say "slavery okay". A textual reading of the constitution would suggest that slavery was not okay and, in fact, despite the longevity of that peculiar institution, unconstitutional from the day of that particular document's final ratification.

I concur. Tom Toles is usually at least thoughtful in his critiques, but that's just lame.

Kevin_Willis: "That being said, nowhere in the constitution does it say "slavery okay". A textual reading of the constitution would suggest that slavery was not okay and, in fact, despite the longevity of that peculiar institution, unconstitutional from the day of that particular document's final ratification."

U.S. Constitution, Section 2(House of Representatives):

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons"

It never hurts to read the document in question before commenting, don't you think?

"Slavery is seen in the Constitution in a few key places. The first is in the Enumeration Clause, where representatives are apportioned. Each state is given a number of representatives based on its population - in that population, slaves, called "other persons," are counted as three-fifths of a whole person...

"The Fugitive Slave Clause is the last mention. In it, a problem that slave states had with extradition of escaped slaves was resolved. The laws of one state, the clause says, cannot excuse a person from "Service or Labour" in another state. The clause expressly requires that the state in which an escapee is found deliver the slave to the state he escaped from "on Claim of the Party."

Frederick Douglas joined a group of North Eastern liberals from Massacusetts that opposed the Constitution because it included slavery.

The group asked him to speak on their behalf, so Frederick Douglas took his membership more seriously and decided to take some time and read the Constitution more seriously. After a full reading Frederick Douglas determined that the Constitution was indeed a document based on liberty. That the only objectionable clause(3/5ths Clause) that triggered much controversy was a definitivly a sanction on the representation of slave states by subtracting their representation numbers based on their inability to properly deliver freedom and liberty to the citizens in their states.

"The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made.”

Here is what Fredrick Douglass had to say to those who continue to dismiss the genius of The Founders because they did not outlaw slavery :

“Let me tell you something. Do you know that you have been deceived and cheated? You have been told that this government was intended from the beginning for white men, and for white men exclusively; that the men who formed the Union and framed the Constitution designed the permanent exclusion of the colored people from the benefits of those institutions. Davis, Taney and Yancey, traitors at the south, have propagated this statement, while their copperhead echoes at the north have repeated the same. There never was a bolder or more wicked perversion of the truth of history. So far from this purpose was the mind and heart of your fathers, that they desired and expected the abolition of slavery. They framed the Constitution plainly with a view to the speedy downfall of slavery. They carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion.

"The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made.”

Guys, you realize that posting Tom Toles' comics here is a regular thing, right? Ezra didn't just decide to drop a Tom Toles cartoon in today becaues of the Journolist flap. Now, who knows how Toles came to that comic. Maybe he's a regular here and wanted to make some comic. I don't know, but we should keep in mind who actually produced the things we're discussing before we dump on Ezra.

That said, though I do think there's a lot of tension between Constitutional originalism and a lot of our modern views about race, gender, punishment, etc., this isn't my favorite Toles cartoon.

IMHO, any "tension between Constitutional originalism and a lot of our modern views about race, gender, punishment" is due to a misreading of our Constitution, just as Fredrick Douglass was disposed to before taking some time to read it.

his quote puts it all to rest. It is a liberty document that represents everything that is still true today.

PS: I learned of this Frederick Douglass story by watching Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck does a special on every Friday that highlights the important role played by blacks in the original founding of this great nation----he specifically pickls the stories that liberals have intentionally tried sweeping under the rug with lying propaganda like this Tom Tole Cartoon.

Liberals cannot let you know that the Constitution is fine just the way itis---that would prevent them from consolidating the power they need to TAKE CONTROL!

The LastBrainleft: "I do not see the word "slave" mentioned anywhere in your quote. You lose."

If the passage makes explicit mention of "free Persons", and then makes reference to "three fifths of all other persons", what are the "all other persons"? Household pets?

As mentioned by other commenters, there is also this passage in the Constitution:

"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.)"

Since indentured servants were a vanishingly small fraction of those people "held to Service or Labor" the passage perforce is referring to slaves.

The framers of the Constitution may not have liked slavery, but they perforce had to compromise and include these elements in order to get the southern states to ratify the Constitution. No doubts about that.

This whole flap started because some members of the Tea Party movement have been quoted as wanting to go "back to the Constitution as originally written". This does not mean they want to reinstate slavery. But it does mean that they need to choose their words more carefully.

Breitbart and Tucker Carlson have exposed your little scam. So you actually think that calling your political opponents "racists" is going to hurt anymore, now that we know that it was part of your scam all along?

Sorry, Ezra, you were a White House Regime Stooge all along. Too bad for Progressive fascists that conservatives are fighting back with brass knuckles on.

We're going to make you wish you had never picked up Alinsky. Uncle Saul's greatest failing is that conservatives could read and internalize his teachings.

What an ignorant cartoon. No one is asking to go back to the constitution PRIOR to the amendments that abolished slavery!
This is an unadulterated attempt to play the race card, damage the image of those they disagree with by telling lies, and playing races against each other.

The cartoon is pretty funny and points out the central contradiction of the Founding Fathers. But the Constitution did not authorize slavery, and Douglass was right, in that if it is followed, it covers everyone.

The Founders were great leaders and thinkers without a doubt. But on the issue of slavery they simply ignored their own words and stained their legacy. The Marquis De Lafayette, who fought alongside Washington, warned them that this would happen. It's a shame they didn't listen.

Further we've had enough evidence that journalism is dead and the media, most of it, has been exposed by these fakeries in the NYT, Dan Rather, and other situations.

Newspapers should just fold up and go away as they are not credible sources of news anymore and the people working for them make up things to attack and change the subject as the smoking gun of the Journolist proved.

These fascists wanted to shut down a cable network and plotted to hurl the 'racism' charge to sidetrack the real issues.

There you go again, Ezra Klein, another white leftist trying to use black people as pawns in your delusional pursuit of total state power. Oh, and this cartoon is really stupid. If I didn't despise you, I'd feel sorry for you.

I'm not sure if this is insanely stupid, or insanely pathetic. I think both actually, it's a tie. Good luck to you and your paper, you're really going to need it if you keep publishing stuff like this.

This is why the Dinosaur media outlets, like the Washington Post, are dying. They consist of poorly educated cartoonists and pundits that are irrelevant. Their propaganda is just too dumbed down, even for the American sheeple.

Good Job Ezra- You just keep right on proving that you are a complete tool of the far left wing idiots. Do you actually think before you publish your crap, or do you just hit the play button on your pathetic little brain stem and recite the crap you hear from your fringe journolist america haters?

"...he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:[11] and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

It's from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Look it up...(http://www.princeton.edu/~tjpapers/declaration/declaration.html) The Declaration presented a list of abuses King George had committed against the colonies as justification for the colony's split with England. Why would Jefferson, a slave owner himself, include this, knowing that this document would likely lead to war, if he did not believe that abolishing slavery was necessary?

And let me repeat from the above quote: "he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce" In other words, there had been previous attempts to ban slavery in the colonies prior even to the Declaration itself. How could this be if the nation was so "OK" with slavery? A reasonable reading of history would find that slavery was controversial at best; hardly the vision of a wholly racist country the Left has conjured over the past decades for their own self-serving, political purposes.

Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and most of the Founding Fathers fully intended to banish slavery as part of the foundation of this nation but they needed the support of leaders in slave states in order to ratify the Declaration. The same was true when it came to ratify the Constitution. It took just over a hundred years to overcome slavery but overcome it we did (and at a high cost in the lives of soldiers who fought to make it so), as was very clearly intended from the very beginning of this country. It's all there in the history books for the Left to read if they choose to read it.

If that is what Tom Toles really believes, he should retake junior high level American History and he certainly should not be making a living producing inaccurate messages. Please remember that the Constitution has amendments and one of them eliminates slavery. The cartoon is disingenuous in that it implies that the amendments are not part of the document. This would mean that Mr. Toles has no freedom of speech or press. Mr. Toles needs to get whupped up side the head with a copy of the full Constitution with all of the amendments. Maybe, just maybe it will sink in. And one other thing, I wish people would stop judging history using today's standards.

Kevin Willis: It never hurts to understand what you're reading. Counting slaves as 3/5 of a person was insisted on by anti-slave northerners to minimize the number of southern congressman since representation in Congress is based on population. They were anticipating pressure to extend slavery.

Ezra, we should be a little more tolerant and little less prone to throwing stones regarding the history of slavery. There were those amongst us who made an awful lot of money in the process, even in the North, most especially in the North. It was the Northern colony of Massachusetts who first legalized slave trading in the New World and New York was pretty much the center of the slave trade in the Americas -- even as the Civil War was underway.

Don't forget, it was a Virginian who tried to set a precedent against slavery with the Declaration of Independence, but who was overruled by Northerners. It was Virginia who had its laws against slave trading overturned by a Constitution that was rammed down the throats of the country by a select elite of Yankees. It was the process of Nullification, originated by Southerners, that Northerners used to justify not returning escaped slaves to the South, even when the central authorities in Washington (i.e. Lincoln) told them they had to.

Your pat little jabs are really below the belt barbs that ignore the subtleties of history. Yes, the Constitution was a flawed document, likely intentionally flawed, but it, along with the amendments that have been added (well most of them), would provide a far better governing structure than the whim worshipping, do-whatever-we-want-cause-we're-the-annointed-political-class, out-of-control corporate-state feudalism that we have today.

So if you favor limits on government power via a written constitution and you believe that politicians and judges should actually abide by those rules, you're in favor of slavery? Where's the logic? Actually, nullification was used by several states to blunt the fugitive slave law, a FEDERAL law. Dred Scott was a pro slavery ruling made by a FEDERAL court. But there's a larger question. What's the point of having a system of delegated powers if the Federal Government can claim unlimited powers by invoking the Commerce Clause and general welfare? And if the Feds are to be the final judge of the limits of their own powers, what's to stop them from deciding there are no limits? Isn't this the predicament we're in today? But to ask these questions would require an understanding of American history beyond the grade school level.

Typical liberal race bating. When you run out of valid arguments, you just toss-out the race card. This is a disgusting display of ignorance that totally ignores the truth about the movement and the document.

No wonder the liberal media is on it's last leg. When you have no talent and a limited knowledge of a subject, just make something up that plays to the ever shrinking audience of uninformed and easily amused people.

Critics should consider reading the Constitution and the amendments before criticizing it's contents. I wouldn't lie to you. It isn't near as hard as reading the Healthcare or the Financial Reform bills.

When people resort to name-calling, you know they are losing the argument. Ironically, Obama is pushing to enslave everyone on Earth who is not an elitist Bankster. The next step will be to exterminate 90% of the population. But if you don't want that, you are racist.

Everyone conveniently forgets that slavery came from England and slaves were property. Property rights were superior in law, and therefore reflected in the framers writings in assurance of property rights among free men.

It's not easy to free slaves unless someone is willing to compensate for the owners loss.

At any rate, it's difficult to imagine any superiority involved in freeing black slaves from plantations in the South in order to enslave them in factories in the North.

We have a long way to go in this country but we'll never get there without honesty.

Until, as a society, we are willing to accept that slavery wasn't just a "black" thing racism will continue to be a "button pushing" issue.

Slavery is the calling card of tyrants and takes many forms. Slavery is not limited by the color of ones skin and has been used equally against all mankind.

In today's "modern" (I use that word very loosely) political commentary arena, past transgressions and the acts of the few hopelessly misguided are used to perpetuate a never ending war of races against one another. Are we all going to remain so ignorant and uneducated in our thinking as to continue to allow ourselves to be manipulated into a state of constant upheaval and hatred?!!

Racism will end when we stop allowing it to be used as a root cause for completely unrelated arguments. Racism will end when we stop allowing a vocal MINORITY of evil and hateful people to continue its perpetuation. Racism is not a bit different than our continuing search to find "monsters abroad" to go to war against. It is a means to an end. It is one of many ways our "rulers" keep us under their thumbs.

Wake up... ALL peoples of ALL skin colors. YOU are being manipulated (both sides of the issue) into fomenting chaos where none really exists for the purpose of a small minority of "elitists" to retain power over our lives!!

This cartoon is just another "false flag" operation to stir up resentment over slavery and to keep racist tensions alive and well. Although I'm breaking my own rule by posting here, its high time we ALL start ignoring such blatant attacks on our intellect by not giving these "rabble rousers" the time of day. I would, however contend that based on the majority of comments in this column, it would appear many already recognize the unabashed anti-intellectual argument presented. At least from that standpoint, perhaps there is hope for future generations!

I'm so glad that this cartoon was posted because it, like many other things that have taken place in the past 18 months have done nothing but expose the true nature of the left. This, however, exposes their total ignorance of American history and shows why government run schools and universities are deliberately dumbing down American citizens. FastEddieO007 nailed it with his post about where slavery is in the Constitution.

Just think, this moron, Klein, was instrumental in working to get a Marxist into the White House! That, in case anyone didn't understand before, is why the whole JournoList issue is such a big deal. Who in the hell does Ezra Klein and his stupid cronies think they are to deliberately fix the news to put into office who they think should be there. Does he know what is better for me and my family than I do? Does he better understand how this country should be governed? I would have to say no because this dumb ass doesn't even understand that the Constitution is an anti-slavery document.

Mr. Klein and the other Liberal jokes who call themselves journalists are the true slaves because they don't seek the truth (truth about our history, for example) and believe everything they were told by their Liberal professors and politicians. Now we put up with the Left's totalitarian attitude and their misguided belief that they know what's best for us. Klein and the other Democratic party underlings disguised as journalists attempted to ensure that we knew only what they wanted us to know. Truth be damned!

I will say this, you have balls, Mr. Klein to think that anyone would continue to take you seriously after the exposure of JournoList. If that wasn't the nail that sealed the coffin, your exposure of your own ignorance of America and its history with the posting of this cartoon ought to do it!

I just find it hilarious that people are actually asking "who wants to reinstate slavery?" as if that is what Toles and/or Ezra are trying to say. Get a clue people, it's a joke. Jokes aren't to be taken literally.

So any American (regardless of political affiliation) who wants to stick with the enduring ideals and principle outlined in our constitution is a racist! This is a disgusting, unintelligent and intellectually dishonest post and political cartoon. Disgusting! Once again – can’t win the argument based on facts or reason – so we have to stoop to name calling and race baiting!

Ezra, your race baiter slip from JournoList is showing. You are exposed and nothing you say or post has any relevance to thinking people anymore. There were black Founding Fathers. Get an education, or better still, a real job. This one is totally discredited now. You are a biased left-wing flak with an agenda. What part of "all men are created equal" do you not understand?

Free person was a technical and legal term of the time synonymous with citizen. Other persons can include groups such as felons stripped of franchise, children, aliens, and sailors in port, diplomats and so forth.

As for the second, Check out Lysander Spooner the Tnconsitutionality of slavery for a full refutation.

" There are several reasons why this clause renders no sanction to slavery.

1. It must be construed, if possible, as sanctioning nothing contrary to natural right.

...

It needs no argument to determine whether the "service or labor," that is exacted of a slave, is such as can be "claimed," consistently with natural right, as being "due" from him to his master.

...

In these various ways, the class of persons, recognized by the statute books of the States as "servants," was very numerous; and formed a prominent subject of legislation. Indeed, no other evidence of their number is necessary than the single fact, that " persons bound to service for a term of years," were specially noticed by the constitution of the United States, (Art. 1, Sec. 2,) which requires that they be counted as units in making up the basis of representation.

...

2. "Held to service or labor," is no legal description of slavery. Slavery is property in man. It is not necessarily attended with either "service or labor."

...

3. 3. "Held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof."

The "laws" take no note of the fact whether a slave "labors," or not. They recognize no obligation, on his part, to labor. They will enforce no "claim" of a master, upon his slave, for "service or labor." If the slave refuse to labor, the law will not interfere to compel him. The law simply recognizes the master's right of property in the slave—just as it recognizes his right of property in a horse. Having done that, it leaves the master to compel the slave, if he please, and if he can—as he would compel a horse—to labor.

...

4. Neither "service" nor "labor" is necessarily slavery; and not being necessarily slavery, the words cannot, in this case, be strained beyond their necessary meaning, to make them sanction a wrong. The law will not allow words to be strained a hair's breadth beyond their necessary meaning, to make them authorize a wrong. The stretching, if there be any, must always be towards the right.

...

5. "No person held to service or labor, in one State, under the laws thereof."

The "laws," here mentioned, and impliedly sanctioned, are, of course, only constitutional laws—laws, that are consistent, both with the constitution of the State, and the constitution of the United States. None others are "laws," correctly speaking, however they may attempt to "hold persons to service or labor," or however they may have the forms of laws on the statute books.